Tuesday, April 12, 2016

17th-century Painted Draperies as Blocks of Harmonized Color

Luca GiordanoThe Song of the Prophetess Maria
ca. 1687Prado

A yellow-coated pomegranate, figs like lizards' necks, a handful of half-rosy part-ripe grapes,a quince all delicate-downed and fragrant-fleeced, a walnut winking out from its green shell,a cucumber with the bloom on it pouting from its leaf-bed, and a ripe gold-coated olive – dedicatedto Priapus friend of travellers, by Lamon the gardener, begging strength for his limbs and his trees.

– inscription by the Hellenistic poet Philip, resident in Rome, from a collection published in Greek around AD 40, translated by Edwin Morgan and quoted in The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation edited by Adrian Poole & Jeremy Maule, 1995

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."

– Borys Groys, Comrades of Time, 2009

"I study only what I like; I occupy my mind only with the ideas that interest me. They may or may not prove useful, either to me or to others. Time either will or it will not bring about the circumstances that will lead me to a profitable employment of my acquisitions. In any case I will have had the inestimable advantage of not having been at odds with myself, and of having obeyed the promptings of my own mind and character."

– from Products of the Perfected Civilization: selected writings of Chamfort, edited and translated by W.S. Merwin (1969)